Not only are the dimensions bigger than ever, but the songwriting’s more varied.

The record’s strongest moments originate in its audacity rather than precision: Desert Window opens up the ambient ideas she’s perfected in the past into riskier, roomier territory.

I quit starts so strong. .... A brutally honest edit might have reconsidered the more stylistically anonymous or lyrically thin concepts.

Hymnal is a planet of sound, teeming with life, that seems even more habitable than Fountain—a bountiful ecosystem experiencing a permanent May and June.

A collection of balmy dream-pop ballads centering Wolfe’s feathery voice, soft and slow guitar melodies, and spacey synths. It’s striking how conventional it frequently sounds, reminiscent of canonical acts like Beach House.

Phantom Island is freewheeling and ambitious, and mostly admirable for it. Pared back slightly, it might have been truly absorbing.

Though Eno and Beatie’s music often feels simplistic, by the end of Lateral, they’ve inched closer to the center of the heart.

The highs are high and the lows are subterranean at best. And that’s that. .... Luckily, Neil Young is so damn good at what he does that even his most hurried material leaves room for some genius.

Ripped and Torn is the sound of a band making music with the care and attention of a kid standing over a Risograph, printing up the interviews his friends have typed up for their zine, leaving fingerprints on every page.

Largely forgoing the cinematic flair of Simz’s previous records, James surrounds her voice with unfussy arrangements that draw from jazz, Afrobeat, and rock. It’s a difficult balance but they manage, more or less.

Songs feel simultaneously tossed off and over-considered; there are perhaps two passages across C6’s 67 minutes that scan as anything other than the product of a hyper-competent professional in need of serious creative guidance. It would be a disaster if any of it mattered.

These songs contain a newfound lushness, an O’Rourke-ian vibrancy that allows each instrument to express its particular tonalities to the fullest.

More goes big and mature with lusher, sometimes even baroque arrangements to surround Cocker’s voice—a voice that’s huskier, more leaden by time and gravity.

Rae is at her most delightful balancing camp and sincerity on starry-eyed numbers in which all the world’s a stage.

Turnstile experiment more freely than ever on Never Enough.

Their career arc since 2001’s Beautiful Garbage suggests that wobbly songwriting is as much a tic as their masterful studio expertise. The cult still thrives, and we’ll happily settle for Let All We Imagine Be the Light—until the next album.

Alternately atmospheric and gut-punching, Demilitarize embodies these contradictions for a record even more searing—but also touching—than its civil war-inspired predecessor.

Despite its apparent intricacies, Evangelic Girl is a Gun feels oddly flat.

It would have been fascinating to see him apply those gifts more fully to writing about life as he searches for peace in middle age and refinds his voice after falling silent. Instead, Get Sunk feels like a missed opportunity.

It is more interested in signaling than embodying. Cyrus can access the best musicians and producers, and she can register a genuine interest in more subversive art, but few songs on her new album feel like they emerge from experience, or a burning desire to explore new sounds.

The album is at its strongest when it leans into its own mysticality, sounding old-fashioned and contemporary simultaneously.

With Trampled by Turtles—a raw snapshot of perfectly articulated hurt, and the first steps of navigating it for the rest of one’s life—is one of the most compelling records of Sparhawk’s career.

Black Hole Superette features some of his best compositions to date, a whittling down of his maximalist tendencies in favor of a more spacious sound that prioritizes wispy atmosphere over cluttered claustrophobia.

While I Got Too Sad’s emotional tenor can occasionally feel one-note, its warm, lush sound offers a counterbalance to its gloomy lyrics.

caroline 2 offers a profound listening experience. But it also offers a reminder that walking through the English coastline, chatting on Zoom, jamming with your mates for hours on end—these experiences can all be equally profound if you just pay attention.

There’s confidence in the imperfections across Caveman Wakes Up.

Fabulous and melancholy.

The album is full of familiar moves—but comfortingly so.